Clooney and Bridges ham it up for the military satire 'Men Who Stare at Goats'

Ed Symkus

Friday

Oct 30, 2009 at 12:01 AMOct 30, 2009 at 9:40 AM

It’s odd enough seeing the characters that George Clooney and Jeff Bridges play in the oddly titled, Iraq-set satirical film “The Men Who Stare at Goats." It gets even weirder when the two actors get together to promote the film, when they end up going on so many tangents that they seem to forget what they’re there to talk about.

It’s odd enough seeing the characters that George Clooney and Jeff Bridges play in the oddly titled, Iraq-set satirical film “The Men Who Stare at Goats."

Clooney is Len Cassady, a “businessman” with a cloudy past that involves working for the U.S. government as a member of paranormal army of warriors who can become invisible. Bridges is Bill Django, the founder of the program who first mashed up New Age philosophies with combat training.

It gets even weirder when the two actors get together to promote the film, when they end up going on so many tangents that they seem to forget what they’re there to talk about.

Clooney mentions that he’s done a couple of war spoof films before, the most recent being “Three Kings.”

“But ‘Batman and Robin’ was obviously the first,” he says, smirking. “Just wearing a rubber suit with nipples on it is a battle.” He laughs at his own joke, then, referring to a number of small movies he’s made, adds, “Over the past few years, we haven’t really done many things that have focused too much on the economics of making films. We just try to make sure they make their money back so we can keep making those kinds of films.”

Bridges, a laid-back fellow who looks like he could easily float right into his Dude persona from “The Big Lebowski,” isn’t sure that “Goats” is all that much of a spoof.

“What’s really going on is much farther out than we believe is going on,” he says, addressing real world paranormal activities and experimentation. “That’s my position.”

Before he can expound on that, he’s asked about the dolphin warfare research in the film and about his own experiences with dolphins.

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” he says, recalling a long-ago memory.

“In the ’70s, when all of that was going on, I was buddies with John Lilly, the guy who was trying to communicate with dolphins. He also invented the isolation tank. I was actually a guinea pig for him in the tanks. And I actually am a dolphin. It all happened back in the ‘Sea Hunt’ days when I would visit my father on the set.”

There’s more laughter, then the subject of a dance scene in the film comes up, and Clooney is asked to rate the dancing abilities of his co-stars.

“I think Jeff is a very good dancer,” he says. “Ewan (McGregor) a very good dancer. But I am not what you would consider a good dancer.”

Bridges cuts in.

“What George can do that I was surprised at is when we got to the yoga scene, George said, ‘Can you do this?’ And he immediately pretzelled on me, totally turned himself inside out.”

Another surprise in the film is that Clooney’s Cassady is a guy who’s not really as smart as he thinks he is. Yet Clooney admits he’s played that role before. He refers to it as the idiot syndrome.

“When I did the first scene for the Coen brothers in ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ I was sort of playing dumb, and they said, ‘You’re the smartest guy in the room.’ I thought that was really good direction and made sense. Those kinds of characters are funny to me. A lot of the stuff Cassady did in this film actually worked. I thought he was a sort of Mr. Know It All, and those characters are fun.”

Bridges turns things a bit more serious by explaining that despite all of the silliness in the film, a terrific message is tied right into it.

“The actual idea of trying to get past warfare is a beautiful idea,” he says. “I think everybody can relate to that. We’ve got to figure out some way to stop killing each other over disagreements.”

Even Clooney, the consummate prankster who likes to toss off goofy answers, comes down to earth when asked when he first realized he was famous.

“Look,” he says, without a hint of a smile on his face, “everything is luck. I ended up on a television show that was averaging 40 million viewers a week, on some weeks almost 50 million. That’s a lot. That makes you famous no matter what you do. All of us on that show sort of immediately became famous. So it was sort of an overnight thing for us after doing 12 years of really bad television. So I probably realized the week after ‘ER’ debuted.”

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